


Rapture

by AlphaFlyer



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Angel/Demon Relationship, Battle of New York (Marvel), F/M, Friends to Lovers, More like an idea and a vibe, Not strictly Good Omens, Post-Battle of New York (Marvel), Wingfic, another day another chance at Armageddon, nameless Angel & Demon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-18
Updated: 2021-02-18
Packaged: 2021-03-13 07:48:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29523183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlphaFlyer/pseuds/AlphaFlyer
Summary: “So what does Armageddon look like this time? World War? Genocide? Insurrection? Global pandemic?”“Alien invasion,” he says drily. “Leading to war, pestilence and really bad political takes. Something for everyone.”“And you know this how?”“Barton,” he shrugs.  “He’s currently inhabited by one of them.”High above New York, an Angel and a Demon contemplate divine intervention over a nice glass of rosé.
Relationships: Angel & Demon (Good Omens), Angel/Demon (Good Omens), Clint Barton/Natasha Romanov
Comments: 12
Kudos: 46
Collections: Be Compromised Promptathon





	Rapture

**Author's Note:**

  * For [inkvoices](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkvoices/gifts).



> This story was written for my dear friend **Inkvoices** , for the **be_compromised** Valentine’s Day Promptathon, to this divine prompt: _"Inspired by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's_ Good Omens _, as in the spirit of it, but not strictly that story: Clint and Natasha are an angel and demon who have been on Earth for so long that they're closer to each other than their respective sides and have become each other’s person."_
> 
> Key here is “ _not strictly that story_ ” – I worked with the basic idea and the vibe, not the actual characters - but I hope it scratches some Good Omen-like itches (among others).
> 
> A bazillion thanks are due to my collaborator and sounding board, **ALeaseInWonderland** , for reading this and reminding me that less is more.

“You again? People are going to talk, you know.”

He hasn’t even turned; angelic vision seems to encompass the full 360 degrees. But the tone of his voice and a subtle shift in his wings make it clear that her presence is welcome. His wings are black now; for a moment she wonders idly whether he has chosen the colour in a nod to her, knowing she would come. The falling dusk, she notices, gives them an almost purple sheen.

Finally, he faces her; the smile in his eyes belies the diffidence of his earlier words.

“Yeah, well,” she says as she sits down beside him, careful not to dislodge the bottle of wine and two glasses that have materialized on the ledge between them. “There aren’t that many conversation partners around this planet with shared life experiences. Besides, I thought you called?”

She inspects the label on the bottle. _Pointe du Diable Rosé_ , its colour deepened by the early evening light _._ He knows what she likes and is happy to indulge her; the hard edges of his own ascetic nature have long since been worn down by the delights and sensations this world has in abundance. And like her, he spends more and more time in corporeal form to enjoy them.

“I suppose I did,” he finally admits. “Although it wasn’t entirely conscious.”

She lets this slide; denial of their close association continues to be a bit of a thing for him.

“I like the look of your new wings,” she says. “Black suits you. The white was a little … insipid.”

He chuckles as he reaches for the bottle, removes the cork with a flick of his fingers and starts pouring.

“I thought you’d appreciate the visual.” He hands her a glass. “Nice locks, by the way.”

Her hair, she knows, shines as a halo of flame in the day’s dying light. She’d hoped he would appreciate its humanizing softness; as it turns out, he seems to be fighting an impulse to touch it.

The view from where they are sitting, near the top of the Chrysler Building, is breathtaking. All of New York is laid out before them; windows and metal surfaces are beginning to pick up a fiery gleam as the sun sinks beneath the city’s jagged skyline. Above them, the normally silver scallops of the roof are bathed in gold and the gargoyles that jut out at the corners look ready to leap to life. 

“So what are we celebrating tonight?” she asks, twirling the glass between her fingers and nudging her chin towards the bottle. 

He shrugs; the movement causes his wings to rustle. The sound is both ominous and familiar, slightly threatening yet oddly comforting. It stirs something else in her, too, but she represses that thought as quickly as it arises: Re-enacting the Original Sin is not for the likes of them. Perhaps they have both started to identify a little too much with their latest human avatars. 

She struggles a little to remember her original question as he answers.

“The end of the world. Coming the day after tomorrow, around teatime. Or so I’m given to understand.”

“ _Again?”_ she frowns. “Also, I wouldn’t call that cause for rejoicing, exactly. I thought we were against that sort of thing now.”

He takes a sip of his wine and briefly closes his eyes as he savours the taste. The ability to feel joy for either of them had once been limited to responding to praise from their Masters, but appears to have gone curiously astray on this remarkable little planet. She, too, dips her long and sensitive tongue into the blush-coloured liquid, enjoying the little shiver of pleasure the act provokes. 

She pulls her mind back to the discussion just in time to hear him speak.

“ _We_ are against global destruction, you and I, yes. But it looks like your side is bringing some big guns this time, and I have a feeling that mine’s either been asleep at the switch, or worse, is cheering on the doom for some stupid political reason. And as for the humans, they were completely oblivious until a few hours ago. Sometimes I even wonder whether their … _SHIELD_ hasn’t been infiltrated by… Well, you know.” 

His jaw sets for a moment before he continues. 

“ _Snakes.”_

He draws out the sibilant sound in what she knows is a direct challenge, his crystal eyes boring hard into her smoky ones; her breath hisses reflexively in response. Sometimes, despite the millennia of mutual tolerance and, eventually, friendship, the old instincts occasionally rear up. 

“You said _my side_ is bringing ‘big guns’?” she says, a little snippily.“Might I remind you, most of the messes we’ve cleaned up over the years couldn’t have gotten started without your people's active encouragement.” She sheathes her claws and smoothens the scales on her back before she goes on. “So what does Armageddon look like this time? World War? Genocide? Insurrection? Global pandemic?”

“Alien invasion,” he says drily. “Leading to war, crimes against humanity, pestilence and really bad political takes. Something for everyone.”

“And you know this how?”

“Barton,” he shrugs, naming the human he’d chosen to watch within SHIELD - the man who’s personal aesthetic, she suspects, influenced the change in his wings. “He’s currently inhabited by one of the aliens.”

To her raised eyebrow he responds with, “Long story. I’ve been accessing the man’s thoughts through their mind bond. It’s fascinating, actually. He is …”

She waves him off, casting her thoughts wide to look for her own window into SHIELD, privately castigating herself for not having done so sooner. What she finds causes her to recoil.

“Romanoff is on a tear,” she reports. “Whatever happened to Barton has her seriously riled up. Right now she’s on her way to the SHIELD ship with that scientist-monster thing, the one Beelzebub’s been trying to recruit since Harlem. This does not look good.”

She looks at him through carefully hooded eyes.

“How would you react if someone took me hostage?” 

He blinks in (somewhat adorable) confusion and so she explains. 

“Would you go after them with your flaming sword? Or just send a cloudgram to your Head Office, to the effect that you finally got rid of me, like you were supposed to six thousand years ago?”

His black wings twitch and stretch towards her involuntarily, almost as if to wrap her in a protective embrace, but he resolutely pulls them back. 

“Don’t flatter yourself,” he grumbles, as if caught out in a thought he’d rather not articulate. “We’re … partners now. I made that call long ago, remember? And I’m very much not fond of hypotheticals.”

She lets that slide, for the cop-out she knows it is.

“So now that we know something’s coming, what do we do?” She takes the glass he has poured for her; the sound of an ambulance floats up from the streets below. “Just let it happen and watch them fight it out, like we did in the Somme? Or do we play Gaugamela and help the underdog win?”

Her mind flashes through all the times they met, vanguards of Light and Darkness, changing human destiny on a whim - either by intervening, or not. Most times, they managed to tilt the outcome towards whatever result would inflict the least damage, although in order to keep their respective masters at bay they’ve had to let the occasional ickiness slip through. 

Armageddon, as his senior cadre likes to say, must always be on the table, or humans would stop looking for salvation. And her people’s job, as she well knows, is to instil the necessary fear and loathing to keep things fresh. Balance, as all of them like to say, is everything.

“It’d take some doing to fix this one,” he says, interrupting her musings. “My source plans on opening a crack in the universe and flooding the place with high-tech goblins or something, cause havoc, and take over in the name of law and order. He’s got some kind of magic gemstones to help.” 

She inhales through pointed teeth. 

“That doesn’t sound like my guys,” she says. “Too much forward planning and not enough maggots. Could your alien be freelancing?”

He shrugs.

“His mind is like a sack full of roaches; it’s hard to get a read even through Barton’s thought filters. Also, I think he may just be a frontman; he has to give the gems back to the _capo_ who runs the goblins.”

He is starting to sound more and more like the human whose brain he’s been tapping into these last few years: matter-of-fact, gruff, and distinctly un-angelic; she much prefers this version to the slightly prissy persona he’d taken on during the Renaissance. That, he’d shed only after the Civil War, after getting increasingly angry about how even their best efforts to get the right people to win never seemed to produce any actual change for the better. 

She purses her lips in thought.

“Looks like our bosses may have competition from another dimension - someone with a whole new idea of what ‘balance’ should mean to the universe, perhaps? But if it is some outside third party, there’s nothing to stop us from helping humanity out, right?”

He sighs.

“You do know I’m on probation again, after helping get Obama elected,” he demurs, although there’s not much conviction behind it. “One more fuck-up, and Gabriel will send me down to your lot for eternal burning, or worse.”

“You worry too much,” she says. “Besides, I’m in the same boat after knocking that asteroid off course last year.”

The thing would have landed right between Burgundy and Bourgogne; no more _appellations controlées -_ what a senseless loss that would have been. Of course, Beelzebub hadn’t seen it that way. Philistine.

“If they try to terminate us, we’ll just have to figure something out. And like you said, this looks like an outside job. I like New York; it would be a shame to have to leave, if new management moves in. Plus, who knows what they’re like, and what they’ll do to the place.”

“Point,” he says, looking up at the darkening skies over Manhattan, where stars are beginning to emerge even as the lights behind the countless windows come on. “I’d hate to lose this view.”

Knowing she’s set the hook he’d obviously wanted her to cast, she raises her glass to clink it against his.

“Besides, it’ll be fun!”

*****

_“Little help here?”_

_Natasha has no idea how she’d managed to get onto, let alone stay atop of, the Chitauri sleigh as it careens through the deep canyons of the midtown streets. Loki is in hot pursuit as she tries to make her way to the portal; she suspects he would not be thrilled to see her make it._

_Clint, still on his rooftop perch, acknowledges the call._

_“Got ’im,” he says, and lets fly._

_Natasha counts her blessings when Clint’s arrow, although handily caught by Loki, turns out to be one of those explosive specials – she salutes whatever good luck had made him pick one of those._

_The would-be god is unceremoniously tossed on the penthouse deck at Stark Towers; Hulk turns Loki into a rag doll; Natasha manages to close the portal with his scepter, thanks to a hunch and the sudden awakening of Erik Selvig; and Stark somehow succeeds in diverting a nuke, exploding the Chitauri ship, and falling back to Earth relatively intact._

_The day is won, and the universe still whole. Armageddon will wait for another day._

*****

“I enjoyed that,” he says, wriggling his fingers and practically purring with glee. “They’re awfully good, those two. Although Barton caught me by surprise, jumping off the balcony like that towards the end there. Couldn’t open the window in time and I think he ended up with quite a bit of glass. Your girl was dynamite all the way through though, congrats!”

She can tell how pleased he is by the way his pinion feathers are spreading and retracting, almost as if he were preening. She herself can’t help but stroking her horn buds; divine intervention, they have both learned to appreciate, can be oddly stimulating.

“It _was_ fun,” she agrees _._ “I’m thinking of turning that Hulk-versus-Loki scene into a screensaver and sending it to Nat’s computer as a present. That little shit deserved to suffer after what he did to Clint, and I enjoyed watching. I suspect she will too.”

For a moment they sit there, watching the smoldering craters where the Chitauri transporters crashed to Earth. The setting sun reflects off the shards of glass that litter the streets and the sound of sirens wafts up in the evening air. The battle has been won, but clean-up is just getting underway. The humans are busy.

She breaks the reverie and pops the cork on tonight’s bottle with a snap of her fingers. _Domaine des Anges -_ her choice this time. Its deep, blood-red color seemed appropriate.

“You know, for an angel you seem to be pretty good with battles and global mayhem,” she observes caustically as she pours. 

“I’m an _Avenging_ Angel, I’ll have you know,” he grins back and salutes her with his glass.

“That’s _almost_ the same as a Fallen one,” she smirks back. “Welcome to my turf.”

He shrugs.

“You know, that whole black-and-white, good-and-evil thing is getting kind of old. Especially when half the time you can’t tell whose lies we’re telling anymore. Not what I signed up for.”

She takes a sip of her wine and nods slowly. After all, the entire time, and with the fate of Earth in the balance, neither of their senior management had shown any interest in the outcome. No smokegrams, no sudden beams of light, nothing.

“Frankly, if they’re not interested in giving us any directions, we may as well hand in our resignation and go into the protection business full-time, on our own terms,” she finally says.

“Now there’s a thought.” His sharp eyes scan the buildings below, noting the battle scars on many of them. “That worked quite well for your person, didn’t it?”

“It sure did.” She considers the issue for a moment. “Once she found yours, that is. Neither of them is particularly virtuous, but they're both essentially decent. They do make quite the pair.” 

_As do we._

She brings the glass to her lips again and lets her tongue play in the velvety, red liquid before using it to slowly wet her lips. His eyes follow her movements with evident - and intriguingly impure - interest.

“I wonder what they’re up to now?”

He casts his mind into the city below.

“They’re finishing dinner,” he reports. “Food from our first operational zone in the Middle East, how appropriate.”

He clears his throat.

“Barton’s leg was on Romanoff’s chair pretty much the entire time, and her hand on it. But I suspect you knew that already.”

Indeed. 

The vicarious sensation of warm human flesh pressed against that of another had been hard to ignore - it’s reassuring to know that he’s been feeling it too. She moves a little closer to him on the ledge, transporting the wine bottle to her other side in the process, and is rewarded by the feather-light settling of a black wing on her shoulder.

“Let’s see what they do,” she whispers in his ear, following her words with a quick flick of her tongue that makes him reach for her with his arm as well as his wing. “And maybe…we can nudge them along a little?”

 _Or they us,_ she refrains from adding as she leans into his side.

*****

_“Shower. We both need a shower,” Natasha declares, as soon as they’re back at Clint’s apartment._

_If her voice sounds a little darker than normal, that’s perfectly fine with her. After coming so close to losing him, she has decided that she’s done waiting._

_“I’ll wash your back and check for broken glass, if you can make sure that I don’t have any Chitauri snot in my hair. And after that…”_

_Her voice trails off as she waits for his reaction._

_Clint looks at her with a mixture of surprise, recognition and a sudden feral hunger; a look that answers all the questions they should have asked each other long ago._

_“Deal,” he grins, and reaches for the zipper on his tac suit._

*****

“My, that water _is_ a nice touch,” she purrs. “Romanoff was _totally_ right.”

She looks up at the little cloud of warm rain he’s summoned ‘in the name of authenticity and shared experience’ and proceeds to lick at a rivulet of succulent drops running down his chest. 

“And to think, I thought you just wanted to stay in their heads and watch. Obviously, I underestimated you.”

He snorts and runs his fingernails slowly down the fine, warm scales at her neck; the sensation causes her to shiver a little. Food and wine, as it turns out, are merely a gateway to the true pleasures of corporealization. 

It’s a crying shame that it had to take them six millennia and a pair of human assassins to figure that out. 

“I think,” he breathes into her ear, before grazing it with his lips and tongue, “Adam and Eve were definitely onto something. We should probably have just let them be, do their thing, and maybe learned something.”

She surrenders to the soft, strong pinions between her thighs as he spreads and lifts her, before floating them both high up in the air; the sensation is compounded by the resonance of a pair of strong hands pressing another body up against a shower wall. 

A decidedly un-pious sound escapes him when her tail twines itself around and through his legs, just so; she gives the tip an extra flick for good measure and is rewarded by another, deeper moan.

“You are bad,” he growls. “Very, _very_ bad.”

She chuckles in impish delight. 

“I can’t help it. I was made that way.” 

She leans back her head, allowing her hair to float freely on the evening breeze as they open themselves to a whole new world. 

“So why not show me just how good you are?”


End file.
